During a five-minute video clip on “hostile design,” noted science fiction writer and design critic Bruce Sterling (author of Britannica’s extensive history of science fiction) offers up two wonderful stories: one, a hilarious George Carlin-like take on what a pay phone designed by Google would be like (minute: 1:18) and the other on why physicists in the tunnels of CERN, lost in that chasm between the “two cultures” of science and art, would seemingly rather die than paint. As Bruce says about the latter (minute: 3:08),

“I went down once into the accelerator at CERN in Geneva, and when we were driving around the accelerator ring in an electric golf cart and the guy was explaining that they are out, you know, pursuing the pi meson or whatever, he said, you know quite often we have accidents down here because people are driving the 27km line of this tube and they just zone out and crash into the wall.

So I said why don’t you just put in some murals to break the visual monotony, and he just starred like I had come from Mars, and I said, look, it’s lit 24 hours, right? Why don’t you put in some house plants? I mean just kind of humanize the interface a little bit. I mean this is so punishingly monotonous that you are actually harming people. The guy’s brain couldn’t go there. It’s a physics instrument, you know. You can’t paint it!”